Grace Nichols
In the poem by Grace Nichols ‘Of course when they ask for poems about the ‘Realities’ of black women’, this poem contains certain splits which reflect upon her experience as an immigrant moving from the Caribbean to the United Kingdom and how she collaborates her two worlds together, by using both Creole, the language from her homeland and Standard English. She resists the notions of the black women in a contemporary society through her poetry and is rather fond of her Caribbean heritage and also still being proud of her European custom and seeing it as belonging to her. This space ‘in between’ of being a writer between two worlds, are all geographical, cultural and personal and there is a split that is caused not only by physical migration but by the adoption of new cultural customs, and the personal rifts of identity and agency.
Grace Nichols strived to find her voice in London to write about her homeland Guyana, and the pressing issues of black women ideologies. She strives to be true to the inner language of her voice by fighting against these dogmas that conflictingly were being imposed from the colonial power that is her current homeland, the United Kingdom and she achieves this by creating something new. In her poem ‘Of course when they ask for poems about the ‘Realities’ of black women’ she defeats the black women stereotypes by refusing the historical legacy of the grotesque and patronizing colonial structures of the black women and the black women as ‘frail victims.’ 1 She gets this message across in the poem when she states: “Maybe this poem is to say, that I like to see we black women full-of-we-selves walking Crushing out with each dancing step the twisted self-negating history we’ve inherited Crushing out with each dancing step,”2 this is a split that is caused by the physical migration into a colonial country and her need to express the issue caused by colonial powers. Fortunately, by being a black British writer, her voice is heard much
Grace Nichols strived to find her voice in London to write about her homeland Guyana, and the pressing issues of black women ideologies. She strives to be true to the inner language of her voice by fighting against these dogmas that conflictingly were being imposed from the colonial power that is her current homeland, the United Kingdom and she achieves this by creating something new. In her poem ‘Of course when they ask for poems about the ‘Realities’ of black women’ she defeats the black women stereotypes by refusing the historical legacy of the grotesque and patronizing colonial structures of the black women and the black women as ‘frail victims.’ 1 She gets this message across in the poem when she states: “Maybe this poem is to say, that I like to see we black women full-of-we-selves walking Crushing out with each dancing step the twisted self-negating history we’ve inherited Crushing out with each dancing step,”2 this is a split that is caused by the physical migration into a colonial country and her need to express the issue caused by colonial powers. Fortunately, by being a black British writer, her voice is heard much
Bibliography: Hall, Stuart. “Cultural identity and diaspora.” Identity: Community, Culture, Difference. Ed. Jonathan Rutherford. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990. 222-237. Nichols, Grace. “Of course when they ask for poems about the ‘Realities’ of black women” Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Woman. London: Virago, 1989.